You need fear no lawsuits if you upload the David Byrne song on a recently-released CD to your favorite file-sharing service. Byrne, the Beastie Boys and several other artists have contributed tracks to “The Wired CD,’’ a compilation of new music that invites listeners to “Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.’‘

The CD was released under the Creative Commons license, launched by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig. (Look at the very bottom left-hand corner of this blog and you’ll see a Creative Commons license. I always knew David Byrne and I had some affinity.) The CD, distributed as part of Wired magazine’s November issue, is “the boldest experiment yet in trying to catalyze support for copyrights compatible with the digital reality of the 21st century,” according to a San Jose Mercury News article.

The non-profit Creative Commons project has been working since 2001 to develop a middle ground in which artists retain some rights while giving other rights away. “It allows you to disaggregate the rights in copyright,’’ said Neeru Paharia, Creative Commons’ assistant director. “Say I want to keep all my commercial rights, but I don’t care what people do with this non-commercially. You can pick and choose from the attributes we offer.’’ Thirteen of the artists on the Wired CD agreed to a “sampling plus’’ license. That lets anyone take snippets of sound and transform it into their own commercial work and copy and redistribute the song on Internet file-sharing networks, so long as it’s not for profit.

Also part of Wired’s November issue is a first-person piece by Hilary Rosen, former head of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and spokesperson for the effort to sue customers for sharing music. It seems she gets the Creative Commons concept. Lessig’s response also appears in the piece.